Wow! What a night!

Costumes and an awesome mock up of an incubator definitely caught the eye of Wellingtonians last night!

Starting at Liza's local pub in Eastbourne, they were met by Jackie, one of the nurses from Wellington Neonates. Jackie then did a great job setting up the CPAP mask correctly on our baby doll for us. While we went and spoke to people about what we were doing.

After leaving Eastbourne, we headed straight into Wellington. The group of pseudo Dr's and Nurses definitely got a lot of attention. Quite often we were mistaken for a hens night, a lot of people did a double take and thought (for a second) that the baby was real and once thought we were SPCA collectors! But as people spoke to us, they were impressed with the lengths we were going to reach our fundraising target. We started on Featherston St and worked our way through over 13 bars, however a there were a few stand out people that we met and want to mention.

We met Lisa at one of the bars on the waterfront where after doing collecting from the awesome patrons, we were having a quiet drink at the bar before moving on. She came over and talked to us for a while about what we were up to and our experiences with our kids. We gave her our blog address and thinking that she was about to head on she surprised us. She pulled out her wallet. She donated $20 for each of the prem mums there. $20 for Liza, $20 for Nicola and $20 for Tamar. Thats a total of $60. We were floored and she certainly got enormous hugs from all of us.

Not long after that we were in a great little bar (3C) in Chews Lane. The band was just setting up to play for the night and we met a great guy called Colin Bailey. He listened as we told him what we were up to and then decided he was going to donate. Awesome. What was even more awesome, was that he gave us a $100 note. Wow. We got some tips of where to go from one of the other guys there as well so we headed down Willis Street and onto Manners. Just after Cuba Mall we were stopped by a young women asking what we were doing. She squealed and told us she was a prem and would love to donate. We were very surprised when she told us to wait right there and she would be back with some money. She ducked into the shop to use their eftpos and next thing we know she is back to drop her hard earned cash into one of our buckets. We learnt that she and her brother were twins born at 24 weeks. They are both grown up now and attending their first year of university. We gave her this blog address, and I'm sorry that we didn't get her name before she went off to enjoy the rest of her night.

Meeting this charming young lady was just one of the touching stories that we heard last night (we heard a lot). It certainly seems that while the neonatal journey isn't something that everyone goes through, it seems like it touches an awful lot of people when someone does. A lot of people we spoke to had nieces, or nephews or friends babies (if not their own) who had spent some time in a neonatal unit. It truly was an eye opening experience.

And then to top it all off, Kahn the lovely taxi driver from Wellington Combined dropped us (and the incubator!) back to Featherston Street for free. How about that for a charitable donation.... He did get a fair few hugs though.....=0)

So how much did we raise from inhabitants of this fair city? An absolutely phenomenal $1264.30! An absolutely HUGE thank you to everyone that "threw a few coins" in the bucket. Those few coins have all added up and we are now unbelievably close to the $5k half way point for our fundraising.

If you missed us while we were out and about, the please head over to our fundraising page to donate, as we keep saying every little bit helps.

Lastly a big thank you to Yvette, one our team members who isn't a premmie Mum but is a solo Mum of 3 children with her own business and she still found the time to make us our terrific incubator!